Aimee Chang

The back cover of Olu Oguibe’s book The Culture Game (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) reads, “In self-congratulatory tones of tolerance, the Western gatekeepers of the contemporary art world take great pains to demonstrate their inclusive vision of world culture.” The text continues, “Non-Western artists soon discover that this veneer of liberalism masks an array of unwritten, unspoken, and unseemly codes and quotas dictating the success of their careers. In past decades, cultural institutions in the West resisted difference; today, they are obsessed with exoticism. Both attitudes reflect entrenched prejudices that prescribe the rules of what Nigerian-born artist, curator, and scholar Olu Oguibe terms the ‘culture game.’”

While it might seem strange to begin a discussion of a book with the promotional copy on its back cover (and on the web pages of sites dedicated to the sale of the book), the passage is a reasonable, though not particularly nuanced, summation of the bulk of Oguibe’s prologue, as well as an introduction to the most problematic chapters in his text. Starting with the back cover is also a way of questioning how the book is being marketed—that is, why use a polemical diatribe to advertise a book containing eye-opening and meaty art historical readings? It would appear that—in an ironic confluence with Oguibe’s arguments—it is his position as an outsider rather than his revolutionary work from within the art world that is being publicized.

Among Oguibe’s many credentials is a doctorate in contemporary and African art, and his chapter on Uzo Egonu, about whom he wrote his dissertation, is among the strongest in the book. That text, along with others from the middle section of the book, “Nation, History, Image,” provide sophisticated readings of the work of, among others, Aina Onabolu, Ernest Mancoba, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Jacob Lawrence, El Anatsui, Fiona Foley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn Ligon, Ghada Amer, and Julie Mehretu. Along the way, he reinscribes the work of artists of African descent and African American artists within the art history of what is too often seen as European modernism, while underscoring the stakes of producing this work in a chapter documenting the history of art education under colonial rule. He also provides an understanding of a Yoruban approach to photography emphasizing illusion and agency rather than reality and automatism (photography as a process of “making rather than taking”), and offers an entrancing analysis of the act of painting as read through Christianity and the central Igbo myth of Asele. These chapters are a tour de force of virtuosic thinking and revisionist art history, and show Oguibe playing his own version of the “culture game” to great effect.

In contrast, the chapters that make up the first section of the book, and which touch on issues highlighted in the prologue, are among the weakest. Polemical and heavy-handed, they present a vision of a monolithic and hegemonic Western art world dictating the fortunes of artists around the globe. While not entirely without basis, Oguibe’s reading ignores major shifts in the art world today regarding exhibition platforms and curatorial practices. The result of downplaying these shifts is an alarmist and ultimately disempowering view for those attempting to institute the very changes Oguibe calls for. He writes, “The contemporary art ‘world’ is one of the last bastions of backwardness in the West today, which makes it an uneven playground, a formidable terrain of difficulty for artists whose backgrounds locate at the receiving end of intolerance.” He cites minimal exhibition allocations and acquisitions of work by non-Western artists—a “game of numbers”—whereby the “face of art history is kept intact.” In these chapters, Oguibe condemns critic Thomas McEvilley for his prurient focus on Ouattara Watt’s African background, critiques the West’s preference for the childlike and exotic in collecting the works of artists from outside the West, and contrasts the work of Yinka Shonibare with that of Chris Ofili in terms of how Shonibare subverts the culture game (by using an “African” signifier in his work that points not to an exotic otherness but rather back to the West) and Ofili (in insisting on the African-ness of his use of elephant dung) does not.

Yet, Oguibe elides the ways in which a growing number of international curators are forcing a shift in art institutions and a rewriting of art history. This omission is made all the more glaring by his relationship—as co-editor of Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (MIT Press, 2000) and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art—with Okwui Enwezor, curator of Documenta11 and the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, the latter of which was groundbreaking in its inclusion of a wide range of international artists. Also overlooked by Oguibe are curators Hou Hanru, Paulo Herkenhoff, Vasif Kortun, and Cuauhtémoc Medina, to name a few. His argument would have been strengthened by an entry examining the work of these curators and the shifting grounds of the global art world, especially given that the inequalities he points to are not without merit.

One can easily argue that most of these curators have done at least some of their work on a freelance and independent basis, separate from permanent institutions. One could (indeed should) also mention that, for artists, presentation in international biennials does not provide the same kind of financial stability as entering public collections or having major gallery representation. Given that these points are so easy to argue it is surprising that Oguibe leaves them out. This oversight might be attributed to the fact that the essays in the collection were not written with a book in mind and instead represent a selection of texts from the past ten years; however, this does not excuse some of the most problematic passages occurring in the more recently written prologue.

These questions came back to me at an exhibition that opened recently in Los Angeles. African American Artists in Los Angeles, a Survey Exhibition: Fade (1990-2003) is the first of a three-part exhibition series examining the work of African American artists in Los Angeles from the 1930s to the present, which is part of a year-long initiative launched by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Fade, curated by Malik Gaines, includes works by 50 artists from a variety of African American art worlds—community-based, mainstream, and culturally specific—and incorporates works by artists presented in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s influential shows Freestyle and Black Romantic, along with a whole slew of artists not previously appearing in large-scale museum exhibitions.

Seeing Fade, I was struck by how radical an inclusive principle can be. International art exhibitions such as Documenta and various biennials and triennials have been criticized for showing artists already in the fold—for showcasing the global while simultaneously erasing the local. In contrast, Fade accentuates the local. It includes artists not represented by “high art” galleries (though these artists are also out in full force), and succeeds in presenting different aesthetic viewpoints and art worlds without, as is too often feared, sacrificing a strong curatorial voice. It shows what “relational aesthetics” might look like at the level of an exhibition rather than a work of art, and goes one step further by operating within a decidedly non-monolithic social realm.

In his chapter “In ‘The Heart of Darkness’” Oguibe writes, “There is an element of concessionism in tethering all discourse to the role and place of the outside. To perpetually counter a center is to recognize it. In other words, discourse—our discourse—should begin to move in the direction of dismissing, at least in discursive terms, the concept of a center, not by moving it . . . but superseding it.” Fade, with its unselfconscious focus on African American art in Los Angeles, does this to great effect. It, along with the writings of scholars such as Oguibe, and the work of curators like those mentioned above, is part of a welcome and long overdue move toward new paradigms for art exhibition and viewing.

Aimee Chang is curatorial assistant at the UCLA Hammer Museum. She has written recently on the artists Edgar Arceneaux and Song Dong. Upcoming curatorial projects include an exhibition at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis.